Green Practices and Economic Performance: Mediating Role of Green Innovation in Pakistan's Leather, Textile, and Garment Industries: An integrated PLS-SEM Analysis

Abstract

This paper discusses various green practices, green HR management, green investment, green manufacturing, green marketing orientation and stakeholder pressures on the economic performance mediating by the green innovation and the possible impact of Green Lean Six Sigma (GLSS). Sustainability is also being strongly connected to competitive advantage but application of sustainability has an implementation gap to firms within emerging economies. Thus, this study tried to develop a comprehensive framework on sustainability and performance in an effort to realize what category of environmentally friendly competencies is actually contributing to the economic upgrades in the Pakistani textile, leather and garment sector. Quantitative and explanatory design was chosen with the help of PLS-SEM with SmartPLS 4. This was accomplished by way of a structured survey of sustainability oriented industrial professionals to collect the data. The analysis of a total of 309 responses was performed to test direct effects, mediating effects and moderating effects. Reliability, validity, HTMT, FornellLarcker and model fit were properly examined. Findings prove that there is a massive positive implication of green HRM, investment, marketing and pressure on economic performance by stakeholders. The mediation, though biased, green innovation (b = 0.227, p = 0.001) was also the case, whereas the GLSS was neutral and indicated that the implementation was weak. What was obtained as the resultant model was R2 = 0.775 (GI) and R2 = 0.776 (EP) indicating a high predictive power of the model. The paper describes one of the initial multiple practices, sustainability frameworks of the Pakistani export industries and reveals the capabilities gaps to the policymaker and managers. Future studies that may be conducted encompass cross sector research or longitudinal study.